In the Mountains of Madness

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I am probably the test case of author W. Scott Poole's thesis: I am loaded with Cthulhu jargon and tropes, but I have never read a Lovecraft book. (Although I've read short stories that play off the Howard storyline, and I am a big fan of Charles Stross, who is indebted to Lovecraft's ideas.)

So, why did I read a book about the master, but not his actual works?

I am not sure. Perhaps, the answer is that Poole is correct in identifying Lovecraft as a phenomenon in himself. I certainly intrigued by Poole's discussion of Lovecraft's strange life, his books, and his substantial afterlife. I was amazed at how Lovecraft intersected with so many writers that I grew up reading.

Poole's book is structured into three sections. The first section details H.P. Lovecraft's frankly strange life. Lovecraft's father was committed to a mental institution. Howard was permitted to stay out of school and define his own education, which involved an interest in science, notwithstanding his marginal math ability. Lovecraft was married once, but he seemed more interested in hanging out with his friends than being a proper husband. He developed an interest in self-publishing his own articles and journals as an independent journalist, an activity that had some popularity at the end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century, and anticipating blogging. Lovecraft was also an inveterate reader of “Weird Tales.” His interest induced him to try his hand at writing and he turned out a number of stories for Weird Tales. His stories were popular at the time and he made some money from them, but not a great deal of money.

Poole, however, betrays the ideological bias of his academic roots in two issues. First, in opposition to the majority of Lovecraft partisans, Poole takes the position that Lovecraft's mother was a powerful and enlightened woman who gave Lovecraft the opportunity to become Lovecraft. Most of the successors to Lovecraft have taken the contrary position that his mother was an oppressive force that warped and repressed Lovecraft. Poole makes a good argument, but there seemed a bit too much of contemporary feminism in Poole's approach to seem entirely objective.

Another issue was the question of whether Lovecraft was a pedophile. Poole points out that Lovecraft had many long, strange, intimate relationships with pre-teen and teen boys, which could have been innocent. This is a tough question for any biographer; the issue of disentangling the good of an artist's work from the bad of an artist's life is fraught with confusion. Faced with this issue, Poole decides to exonerate pedophilia:

“I don't believe, by which I really mean I don't know, that Lovecraft's relationships with these young men proceeded to sexual activity. No such assertion can be made even in the suspicious case of Barlow. Lovecraft spent enormous amounts of time with Barlow who, later in life, had numerous affairs with young Mexican men, including his students, while holding a professorship in Mexico City. Barlow later committed suicide when one of his young male partners threatened to out him and destroy his career.
Why would we be shocked, and what exactly does it do to the image of Lovecraft or the meaning of his work, if we learned that he had a sexual experience of some sort with one or more of his male friends?
Anxiety about pedophilia, of course, lurks like a night gaunt in the shadows. This concept, and the terror it invokes, did not become current in American culture until the 1970s. Some might see this as presenting Lovecraft as a predatory homosexual. But that idea of the older, dangerous queen, a notion literally invented by conservative interests in post–World War II America, warrants no meaningful discussion. His relationship with men like Galpin and Barlow had intensity and a depth that cannot be encompassed by such culture-bound constructions. We might as well call Plato a pedophile.
No direct historical evidence has come to light about the nature of Lovecraft's sexual identity. But his life and fiction point to a period in American history that produced vastly original ways of talking about sexuality. Freudian readings of fiction often run aground on the premise that Freud's view of the world tells us something fundamental about human nature. In fact, his influence pushed writers and artists to take what we can only call the Freudian Mythos as a touchstone for their work. Surrealism did this very self-consciously. Other kinds of artists, Lovecraft included, may have worried around the edges of Freudianism in a less self-aware manner. Stephen King once noted, in a comment similar to Alan Moore's observation of Lovecraft's work, that when we consider “psychoanalysis as it existed in HPL's time” in relation to the author's slurping, sucking genitalia monsters “we're in a Freudian three-ring circus.”

So, Poole's position seems to be, “So what if Lovecraft was a pedophile? Different times and different practices, perhaps less hung with forty-year-old men having sex with teenage boys.”

As a Catholic, who has seen all Catholic priests tarnished with perpetually damaging boys because of the bad actions of a small percentage of priests this kind of insouciance is stunning. Someone who has been paying attention to the tropes and calumnies against Catholics would note that Barlow, who may have been, in the vernacular, “molested” by Lovecraft grew up to commit suicide because of being outed as to his propensity for boys.

These, however, are odd points. For the most part, I felt that Poole was giving me a fair rendition and interpretation of the facts.

The second part involves a discussion of the Lovecraft canon. I thought that this section was particularly good. It offers a wonderful substructure for anyone, such as myself, who intends to take a dive into Lovecraft.

The third section involves Lovecraft's legacy, including the appropriation of Lovecraft's work by August Derleth and other writers whose names I grew up with. Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, was a boy acolyte/correspondent of Lovecraft. One of my favorite authors, Fritz Leiber, was another. Poole writes:

“While seemingly playing the old man in his teens and calling himself “Grandpa” by the time he reached thirty, he reserved his deepest affection for young friends and, in the case of Long, Derleth, Bloch, Barlow, Fritz Leiber, and numerous lesser-known, aspiring weird writers, he drew enormous inspiration from their fanboy love of his creations and their personal devotion to him.”

Concerning Lieber, Poole also observes:

“In an introduction to two sections in the The Satanic Rituals that employ Lovecraftian themes, “The Metaphysics of Lovecraft” and “The Call to Cthulhu,” LaVey and Aquino show significant awareness of Lovecraft's actual body of work and how far it departed from various revised versions of it. They are even aware of Derleth's effort to create a “Cthulhu Mythos” that told a tale of good and evil and occultist claims of the “reality” behind his stories.
LaVey came to understand Lovecraft from Fritz Leiber, perhaps one of the most acute observers of what his mentor had been attempting in his fiction. Leiber, largely out of curiosity it seems, attended some of LaVey's seminars at “The Black House” in San Francisco during the 1960s, a discussion group from which emerged the Church of Satan.”

Lovecraft, LaVey and Leiber...what a small, strange world.

After reading Poole's book, I found myself reading Henry Kuttner's [[ASIN:B01MSJW5XV The Time Axis]], which is a very minor, strange work by a great writer. Although The Time Axis is nominally science fiction, the McGuffin in the book involves a thing of pure evil and death somehow existing outside of time and space but trying to enter human reality to pollute and destroy existence, i.e., a quintessential Lovecraftian theme. It turns out that Kuttner was also a friend of Lovecraft. In fact, Kuttner met his wife and writing partner, C.L. Moore, one of the great authors of science fiction, through a “Lovecraft Circle”, a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft.

Small world, indeed.

I am fascinated by the many writers I admired who were touched by Lovecraft. Likewise, the circle of correspondence is also an interesting historical phenomenon. The world of horror/science fiction/fantasy writers was a small one prior to the 1960s. It was probably possible for everyone in that world to know everyone else.

I found this an interesting introduction to Lovecraft.